Protecting Yourself Online

We know that you want a web presence, but you also want to protect yourself and your online assets.  Perhaps you want to blog anonymously or the photos you post on your blog are the way you make a living.   There are many ways that you can safeguard your content and yourself.

The author information for the weblog and your posts is pulled from the Author Profile. If you do not have any entry in the Nickname field, the content of the First Name and Last Name fields will be used as the Author name for the post and may show up in Google searches or in your feeds.

If you'd rather not display your full name, setting a Nickname at Control Panel > Profile > Author Profile will prevent your full name from being displayed in your weblog or feeds. You can find more information on this in our Knowledge Base article on Profile Information in Search Engines

If you have images that you want to display on your weblog, but would like to protect, you may wish to look into digital watermarks, which provide some protection and a way to deter others from using your images. There is a very good article on digital watermarking at Wikipedia.

If you want to keep your content private, you can choose to password protect your entire account, or just specific blogs or Photo Albums. Then, only users with the username and password will be able to access your protected content.

If you are a subscriber with a Plus, Pro, or Premium account - which allow for multiple weblogs - you could create a public weblog that serves as an introduction to your password protected weblog. You could include introduction text, a way to contact you, and a link to the password protected weblog and keep it visible on that weblog using a Featured Post or a Page.  You could then set this weblog as the Home weblog in your account so that your readers are able to access it via the shorter URL for your account - http://example.typepad.com/.

If you want your weblog to be public, but you don't want to show up in search engines at all, you can change your weblog's Publicity settings at Weblogs > Configure > Publicity.  Set "Publicize this Weblog" to No to block search engines from indexing your blog.